Creative Leadership: A new way of thinking about creativity

In our new series on Creative Leadership, we explore just what Creative Leadership looks like in today’s modern / cultural economy.

With automisation but a click or swipe away, the fourth industrial revolution – technology’s blurring of the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres (1) – has brought forth significant societal change, rendered swathes of jobs as we currently know them, obsolete, and ultimately shifted the paradigm of what constitutes the ‘working world’ and our existential way of being.

Yet this uncertainty has forced the question as to what exactly makes us human? And just what will differentiate us from our robotic and algorithmic contemporaries? Professor Klaus Schwab, founder and Chairman of the World Economic Forum (and creator of the term ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’) believes that creativity, or ‘talent’, will be one of those determining factors: “I am convinced of one thing — that in the future, talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production.”

So ‘yays’ all round’ for creative types, right? Yes, but, no. The definition of talent is also a set of shifting goal posts, the good news is that creative and lateral thinking, adaptability, collaboration and learning agility will most likely take precedence over any particular creative skillset.

Creative leadership therefore, is more about how one thinks, and how such thinking culminates in a series of actions, outputs and outcomes.

This Creative Leadership series aims to examine how various creative thinkers and practitioners are moving the dial in our perceptions of creativity, to explore just what creative leadership looks like in today’s modern / cultural economy.